The character actor Tony Rohr, who has died of prostate most cancers aged 84, was ceaselessly forged as villains on display screen. Within the lauded 1980 British gangster movie The Lengthy Good Friday, he performed O’Flaherty, one of many IRA members on London’s streets posing a menace to an underworld property developer, Harold Shand, performed by Bob Hoskins.
Rohr appeared in just one scene of the author Barrie Keeffe’s thriller, but it surely was notably memorable for its brutality. The besuited O’Flaherty and his boss imagine they’re being purchased off with £60,000 in a briefcase by the East Finish crime overlord, however find yourself being blasted by a double-barrel shotgun, their our bodies crashing by way of plate-glass home windows.
Two years later, within the taut, three-part TV thriller Harry’s Recreation, based mostly on Gerald Seymour’s novel, Rohr was a cool, calm IRA brigade commander behind the homicide of a British cupboard minister. When the murderer (performed by one other Lengthy Good Friday actor, Derek Thompson) returns to Belfast, he duties him with eliminating an undercover English agent (Harry, performed by Ray Lonnen) despatched to trace him down.
He had a uncommon starring half in Invoice Morrison’s 1982 BBC play Potatohead Blues as Stan McVay, who discovers that his frozen-chip enterprise is collapsing and his teenage daughter is having an affair with a married man.
Though Rohr was in a position to exhibit his versatility on tv, he displayed his performing expertise most successfully on stage.
As a founding member of the touring Joint Inventory Theatre Group in 1974, he confirmed himself to be adept at interacting with an viewers in its first manufacturing, The Audio system, based mostly on Heathcote Williams’s e-book about orators at Audio system’ Nook in Hyde Park. The New York Occasions declared the “most riveting” to be Rohr’s portrayal of MacGuinness, an Irish “buffoon” speaking about his life and inventing “outrageous tales about his sexual adventures”.
The corporate was a part of the counterculture theatre revolution, growing performs by way of its actors in workshops initially led by the administrators Max Stafford-Clark and Invoice Gaskill, alongside writers similar to David Hare and Howard Brenton. Stafford-Clark stated he had noticed Rohr’s “eccentric, particular person” qualities when seeing him play Fortunate within the Samuel Beckett basic Ready for Godot on the 1969 Edinburgh pageant fringe. He was notably impressed by the way in which the actor “performed the nonsense as knowledge and the knowledge as nonsense” within the character’s keynote 700-word-plus monologue.
Rohr ceaselessly returned to Beckett’s performs and was a founder member of the Godot Firm, a theatre cooperative fashioned in 2004 to take the author’s works to a wider viewers. Its notable touring productions included Ready for Godot in 2006, with Rohr this time enjoying Estragon, one of many two vagrants – his chatting with Vladimir (William Hoyland) sounding “as melodious as a symphony”, in response to the Stage – and Endgame, which Rohr directed in 2009. Over time, Beckett generally requested that he play sure roles.
Rohr was born in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, to Margaret (nee Walsh) and Arthur Rohr, a confectioner, and attended the city’s Christian Brothers faculty, which he hated. He entered performing after service within the Irish military.
In 1963, whereas performing with the New Irish Gamers in Killarney, Rohr had a relationship with Pauline Collins, one other actor within the repertory firm. After it ended, she grew to become pregnant. The couple determined to not marry and their child daughter was given away for adoption. Collins, who in 1969 married the actor John Alderton, wrote movingly of being reunited together with her daughter after 22 years aside in her 1992 e-book Letter to Louise. Rohr additionally then established a relationship with Louise.
He first labored with Stafford-Clark within the Traverse Theatre Workshop firm, Edinburgh, from 1971, which resulted in his being requested to affix Joint Inventory, whose notable productions included the premiere of Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9 (1979).
Stafford-Clark additionally directed him with the English Stage Firm on the Royal Courtroom Theatre (1978-85), forged him as each the hangman and Main Robbie Ross in its manufacturing of the penal colony play Our Nation’s Good within the West Finish (Garrick theatre, 1989-90), and recruited Rohr to his Out of Joint firm in 1993.
Rohr’s different memorable theatre roles included the outdated man whose face hangs virtually immobile within the darkness of an empty stage whereas listening to his personal reminiscences in a spellbinding manufacturing of Beckett’s one-act play That Time (RSC Fringe on TOP Competition, 1996) and a drunken hellfire priest within the political farce Dying for It (Almeida theatre, 2007).
On TV, Rohr performed Solomon Featherstone, the land-owning relative of the rich widower Peter Featherstone, in Middlemarch (1994); a detective in Prime Suspect: The Misplaced Little one (1995); a drunk priest in a bar within the 1996 Father Ted Christmas particular; a grandfather in Jimmy McGovern’s drama The Lakes (1997-99); and the daddy of the care assistant performed by Ricky Gervais in Derek (2013-14).
In 1981, Rohr married Janet Revell; she died in 2003. He’s survived by their daughters, Ailise, Alana and Lily, and by Louise.
